Learning and the Mind of God

Extract

Jesus said “Therefore I tell you, the kingdom of God will be taken away from you and given to a nation producing the fruits of it” (Matthew 21: 43).

Holy Scripture is often tough; indeed I cannot think of passages that simply tread water or offer bland affirmation. When God speaks, he calls us to attention, and generally to reform and renewal. Also, what sounds like condemnation is often a warning to relocate one’s heart, to shift from false to true goals and values, and to be aware that God and not man is the measure of all things.

One reading of God’s authority, of his being the ruler, is the familiar moral or legal one. The idea that duty derives from divine commands can be traced back through figures such as Calvin, to the medieval philosopher-theologian William of Ockham, and from there through an Augustinian tradition back to interpretations of scripture, particularly the books of the Old Testament such as Isaiah. But there is another sense in which God may be thought to be a ruler of reality and this is worth mentioning in connection with higher learning. In discussing truth, Ockham’s near contemporary, Thomas Aquinas, draws on the philosophy of the Greeks filtered through the commentaries of Arabs and Jews. What Aquinas arrives at is the idea that the human intellect is ‘measured’ by things and that things are ‘measured’ by God; so that, indirectly, God is the measure of our minds. What he means is that knowledge involves conforming our minds to the structure of reality—grasping the way things are—and that the way things are in the world is a reflection of God’s own mind.